All posts for the month January, 2016

If you do this right, you can get the materials you need personally and craft the end result, avoiding HUGE costs in the marketplace, and hopefully turning a profit.
PRO-TIP: Before deciding on your definitive profession(s), join all the gathering guilds and do their quest. Once finished, leave the guild and join the next. This will give you 1000xp per quest, which is about 1 level up total.

EXPANDING YOUR MATERIAL OFFERING
You’ll notice that you can only gather 1 item when you begin. In order to expand the guilds’ inventory, they’ll ask you to bring them samples of the other grey-ed out materials. This implies that you have to PHYSICALLY FIND the material node in the world map and gather BNS Gold, making it automatically available for the guild. Clicking on the material in the guild tab (L button) will give you a hint on where to find it. Some of the higher-end materials only exist in high level areas, so don’t rush trying to get them. Proceeding through the campaign will eventually lead you to all locations.

BUILDING YOUR GUILD REPUTATION
Increasing your reputation within the guild is pivotal. Making your name known as a valued customer with let you gather more materials at a bargain price. The only way to do this, however, is forking over the cash. Each material that you gather has a ‘Guild Point’ value attached to it. For instance, ‘Paulownia Lumber’ will get you 5 guild points every time you request it and have it successfully delivered to you. So,

REQUEST IT ALREADY!
Similar to weapon enchanting, you have a ‘Guild Experience Bar’. The more you order, the more it builds up, until you reach a new level and may request rarer materials. Note that this is not really optional, as the new materials can only be gathered by the appropriate level guild.

CAUTION: If you get sick of your profession, you can always leave the guild and sign with another. However, YOU WILL LOSE ALL REPUTATION WITH THAT GUILD and have to start over from scratch. Choose wisely at the beginning to avoid this at all costs, as it’s a significant money and time waste.

CAUTION: Once your level is high enough, lower end materials STOP GIVING GUILD POINTS. Always make sure that the material clearly says it will give guild points when gathered, or else it could be both wasted effort and money.

THE DOWNSIDE
Crafting in Blade and Soul is, in my opinion, one of the best designed systems I’ve seen in an MMO. Why you ask? Because it’s built in such a way that EVERYONE has to go through the same process. There can be no abusing bots, endlessly crafting away scrap items that flood the market and screw up the economy. How is this achieved? Through a time constraint.

Each item you request has a time requirement. For instance, ‘Paulownia Lumber’ takes 30 minutes to gather, ‘Sap’ takes 40 minutes, and ‘Lumber Sap’ takes 6 hours. This is real world time, not in-game, which is an enormous help. You can leave a rare material gathering at night when you go to sleep, and it will be readily available when you wake up the next morning.

The biggest downside? You can only request 1 item at a time from the guild. So, there’s always a queue time for the materials you need.

Note that this means that the cost of crafted items is not likely to drop anytime soon. For instance, imagine you want to buy a ‘Cinderlands Transformation Stone’ from the marketplace, but the markup price is 20 Silver. You might think it’s too expensive, but consider all the necessary steps to craft it:

A total of no less than 12 HOURS are necessary to yield a mere 5 stones, with a maximum yield of 20 stones per day once you have a stash of the correct mats available. Undercutting is simply not viable at all. Hail supply and demand!

CLOSING
And there you have it! I hope this crude little guide will help in your journey to fame and you may need Blade And Soul Power leveling. I’d like to close by saying that patience is a virtue, and you’ll most likely not see any profit for a long time.

But endure Cricket! Once you get high enough with your guilds, the money won’t resist entering your pockets. Once I was high enough, I’ve starting yielding a profit of at least 60 silver per day, not mentioning what I make in grinding and instances.
If you’re in Jiwon server, then I hope we can quest together someday xD.

However I do know that I hate feeling like I’m being unnecessarily penalized if I opt to spread my play time around multiple characters compared to the players who just concentrate on 1. That said, outfits are one of the things I’m somewhat torn on. Typically speaking I like my characters to look different, so don’t always want outfits shared. That said, I’d still probably like to be able to wear seasonal type stuff w/o having to buy it multiple times. Additionally, many of the outfits look different enough on the different races that my characters would still look fairly different even in the same outfit.

I still think the best system is something like Star Wars: The Old Republic. When you bind a store item to a character, you unlock the ability to make as many more (character bound 0 cost) versions of that item as you’d like. For a small additional fee, (and it is small) you can unlock that item for all characters on the account. So the person who only really has a single character doesn’t feel like he’s “wasting money” buying unnecessary functionality, (buying an item for 12 (or whatever max number of characters is) when he only has 1), but the person who does use all his slots doesn’t feel like he has to pay 12x as much for a particular outfit he wants to always wear regardless of which character he’s playing.

I’ve played various games that character locked, or didn’t lock costumes. I can tell you right now I bought far more costumes in the games that didn’t lock them with the help of Blade & Soul Gold, or at least were account bound locks. Not being able to shuffle my costumes around, especially if they were kinda pricey always made me think at least twice about buying them, often resulting in my not buying them at all. Although, when I could swap them around, I found myself doing various splurge purchases, especially for the limited time ones.

I also want to point out (to NCsoft) that the frequency of sales during TA-CBT shouldn’t be used as guidelines on what the player-base wants and are willing to pay for. I saw a lot of people spend their 7.2k coins to buy bunch of stuff that they don’t even care much just because they know it’s only TEST coins. Same applies to something like a 2,000 (25$) worth of costume, lots of people could grab it during TA-CBT, but that doesn’t mean they are all willing to do it during actual launch. This is a very important thing to consider that I hope NCsoft knows.

I played both games and my opinion is B&S is definitely much better. Players are hyped for BDO only for the graphics but without the graphics this game would been just an other generic korean mmo.

Asking in a specific reddit for a game which people prefer, stupid, as you’ll get the answer you expect, one favoring the game the reddit is about.

An honest answer? Blade and Soul has been out three years overseas, and we aren’t getting all the content, they are phasing it in slowly. How slowly, we don’t know yet, but it’s annoying having to wait three years to even get the game announced, and then wonder what they really need to “beta test” besides Blade & Soul Gold. BDO just came out overseas, and they are committed to getting it out here too. Of course it has less content, and not as “polished”, it’s newer, three years newer.

BDO’s character creator blows this out of the water, not even a fair fight. Though the classes are locked to gender and race, which some people hate, but they have similar classes of the opposite sex and are adding more often.

Here’s the thing though, you can play both right now if you are really curious, though if you don’t understand Korean (or other language it’s available in) the story and some aspects will be lost on you, and you can make you own mind up. Blade and Soul is closer to Tera than it is Black Desert though.

Stuns = Dazes(After they have used their Roll) > Dazes (Pre Roll) > Knockdown for the hierarchy of amazing CC. After they have used their F roll dazes become full stuns. Full stuns can only be broken with a Tab escape.

Example Input for one of the heavens blade combos (Timing not included, please go try this on monsters or a friend to get the timings yourself, this is just the button imputs)

SS –> 3 –> V–> RB–> Z(Close heavens blade, return chi) –> LB –> Tab (as target hits the ground to put a daze on them instead of just a knockdown–> 2(Catch their F roll if they have it)–> Lb(Super important standard normal LB, this one chi point is actuially very important for the combo if you didn’t start with full chi.–> Q–> RB–> LB–> RB–> 2–> RB.

This is the goal you want to execute during heaven’s blade for more Blade & Soul Gold. This combination is not perfect, I have many variations of this in my notebooks, but this is the most standard one, that leaves you with options to continue and force a response, to regen chi, or to just back off and be safe. According to my math so long as you have 5 chi at starting you can execute this combo, but as I said the regular LMB after the charge stun, but before going into draw stance is very important.

You only want to upgrade your Hongmoon Weapon, which you’ll get from your class quest in Bamboo Village. This weapon can be upgraded up to Level 45. The same is true for your Hongmoon Amulette, Ring and Earring, which you will also get from your class quest.

When you are at Croaker Lagoon (North of Jadestone Village, around Level 16 or 17), kill Ploggle King Giganura a few times. Using a few spare keys (but not all), open his loot boxes until you have a Ruby with 50-60 Additional Damage on Attack, and an Amethyst with 30-50 Life Leech or 30-50 Instant HP Recovery on Crit. They will help you greatly up to level 45.

Keep your Soul Shield up to date, but only replace parts if the stats are better. You will get the first set from the Wheel at Foshi Pyres (level 8). This set can be replaced at level 20, either with the Viridian Stone Soul Shield, bought with Viridian Stones from the Merchant in Jadestone Village (more HP), or with the Heroic Set dropped in Blackram Narrows (more Block and slightly more Crit at Blade-Soul ). The next upgrade should be at level 28 with a choice of a Cinderlands Set, bought with Cinderlands Valor Stones in Yehara’s Mirage, or the Golden Deva Set from the wheel at Crescent Spring.
Here’s a great guide for which soul shields to use at which levels if you’re more interested.

More tips from /u/Terrormeep , link to comment:
Once you get to Jadestone do all of the profession gathering quests. They’re extremely easy to do and give a whopping 1000 exp each, which lets you skip more time-consuming quests early on (such as the first hub in Cinderlands).

Once you get your desired professions, try to make as many crafting orders as you can reasonably afford. It’s low-maintenance and saves you some time endgame as there’s no way of decreasing the time required to level it.

You can use macros to work around the mouse input delay and rebind the ss evade to a single key.

From /u/Brysonds , link to comment:
One very important one to add is that doing achievements increase character stats. For instance, doing Blackram dungeon 10 times gives your character 400 HP.

Another is once you are level 15+ winning ten 1v1 PvP arena matches gives you 70 defense.

He’s working on a list atm. I’d like to add though that from what I remember you can only choose one of these stats increases, you can choose which one from the Achievements tab.

3. Do not sell the weapons and accessories you find, they can be used as upgrade material so keep them for when the time comes.

4. For arena PvP, whether you use your training weapon or the best weapon in the game you deal the same damage.

5. Your weapon only loses durability when you get hard CC’d (for example knocked down or stunned Cheap Blade And Soul Gold) or when you are defeated and enter falled down state (EACH time you fall down, meaning if you fall down, recover chi and fall down again you lose durability again).

7. You can use RED upgrade gems at any level because they give the same flat experience, however you should keep GREEN upgrade gems for use later in the game to get the full value out of them, maybe combine them with upgrade tickets too (the ones that make sure you get the full upgrade exp etc.).

8. When crafting, you can log out safely without your orders getting cancelled.

9. Once you get to Jadestone do all of the profession gathering quests. They’re extremely easy to do and give a whopping 1000 exp each, which lets you skip more time-consuming quests early on (such as the first hub in Cinderlands).

10. One very important one to add is that doing achievements increase character stats.

For detailed explanations of each tip, read the original post. You’ll find other tips for progression, combat and other aspects.

The problem: You can not share quests with party members.
I love how they managed questing in a party. Generally speaking, 98% of all quest objectives that

are able to be collected or activated, are instantly shared with BNS Gold. A big problem with

WoW for example, for a long ass time, was that you had to do tedious quests like collecting X Wolf

Pelts from Wolves that not only had terrible spawn rates but also horrendous drops…and you did

that twice…or thrice, you name it.

Blade & Soul found a perfect solution for that and imo it’s the best one that I’ve ever come

across, gj!

So, seeing the points above and AGAIN…NCSoft went the extra mile with the questerinos but on the

other hand did not implement the option to share quests with your beloved party members…WHY?

Translation / Skills
Skills are worded poorly (Reduces damge of first attack by 25%)*
I think the general skilltree is amazing and love how skill work and look. The 4 squares with

Range, Area, Cast, Cooldown are AMAZING and give you a fast overview what your skill currently

does or will do when you spec points into Ability X.
Just yesterday, a friend of mine asked me about the wording of a skill on his LBM (i refuse to use

Blade Dancer since it’s so accepted by the community already to use LBM). He read the skill

description again and the first impression is that you are getting punished for putting another

point into that ability, and maybe you need Cheap BNS Gold. because you apparently do

25% reduced damage on your next attack?

Path of Exile / Grinding Gear Games has a very strict and clear policy in regards of how functions

or general descriptions are worded. VERY. VERY. specific.
My one question I have for the Dev’s here in the “West” : How much are you in charge of any of

those changes? oh and…

Post your input and comments down below. Think about what you’re about to post, think again and

then press “submit” 🙂

No tl;dr.
edit1: formatting
edit2: changed keybind section
edit3: crossed out the keybind section entirely
edit4: Due to popular request, i removed all “Don’t get me wrong” comments. Apparently that is